But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country – The Rest Of My Life.

It’s been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.

If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn’t mind being their mother.

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner...

I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel....

And then suddenly she was on her feet, her heart knocking in her chest, a sudden familiar but long-forgotten terror triggered- but by what?

Because I write fiction, I don’t write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as ‘I’ – you...

Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn’t notice that they were alone, so they wouldn’t die without a living soul noticing.

Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

Everyone said, ‘Well, you’re very old for a first novel,’ and I said, ‘How do you write when you haven’t lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight...

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn’t even have the strength to feel guilty.

Without siblings you get quite a skewed vision of yourself and of the world. I always felt I didn’t understand how it worked. I remember feeling quite lonely.

I need to be very isolated to write, and unfortunately isolation is often quite difficult to find. My ideal writing environment would be a country house hotel in the middle of nowhere, with full room...

Teddy didn’t really understand the attraction of the dark side for the young these days. Perhaps because they had never experienced it. They had been brought up without shadows and seemed determined to create their...

I don’t want to spoil the magic, but it’s a very curious thing that honestly baffles me. It’s the nearest we’ll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is...

Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing–getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?…Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them,...

I can’t imagine what it would be like to write in a relaxed state. I’m going to be writing some stories for my own interest. I want to experiment with different things and see if...

And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old...

When I’m writing, my neural pathways get blocked. I can’t read. I can barely hold a conversation without forgetting words and names. I wish I could wear the same clothes and eat the same food...

I was an only child and grew up in York where my parents ran a surgical supplies shop. When I say I wish I had brothers and sisters, friends say it’s not what it’s cracked...

by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds I’ve discovered so far).

I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don’t think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean,...

How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered?

The mind is a fathomless mystery.

My father was an autodidact. It wasn’t a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education – he had a horrible childhood. He got...

They said love made you strong, but in Louise’s opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn’t get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

My work is not my life. I started writing quite late, I didn’t have that ‘writing is everything, my art is all.’ You have to be able to recognise the difference between the two.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. ‘The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,’ she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. ‘Nonsense, Patricia,’ I tell her as I climb on...

I’m trying to take more nothing time – and that means sacrificing doing. It’s partly to do with age, partly to do with the fact that writing takes up a lot of space in your...

Life wasn’t about becoming, was it? It was about being.

He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be...

When I started ‘Case Histories,’ the characters were all going to Antarctica on a cruise. The first part was called ‘Embarkation.’ It was supposed to be about everyone preparing to embark on the cruise, but...

Then others must remember us.

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good...

The cult of the individual is killing us. I think Twitter signals the death of western civilisation, but people have been saying that since Demosthenes.

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

But I, you know, if I could choose a period to go back to, I think I would like to live through the Blitz. ‘Cause you do read so many accounts of people saying they’re...

Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a...

O passado é aquilo que transportamos connosco

‘Feminism’ is such an incredibly awkward word for us these days, isn’t it? Not to be feminist would be bizarre, wouldn’t it?

I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can’t believe I won’t exist. It’s the ego isn’t it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than...

Writing for me is quite a plastic form, a kind of mental sculpture, although that sounds weird. It acquires its character and its depth as it goes along.

He missed having a wild green world on his doorstep – no rabbits or pheasants or badgers.

Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There’s nothing that says I can’t write a page of full stops. There...

This was their third bar since Piccadilly and they were both agreed that the two of them were very drunk but had the capacity to get a good deal drunker yet.

The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.

I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn’t, so I think it is possibly the end.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.